How You Can Help

Now that we are using internet technology to manage Healthwrights have made it more possible than ever for you to volunteer your time from where ever you might live.

All you'll need is time and an internet connection. We need folks skilled in graphic arts, accounting, page layout, writing and editing, publication, website administration, website development, fundraising, web programming and more. It's a great way to help us become more sustainable and continue the good works we do long into the future.

HealthWrights is a small, struggling non-profit organization run and managed largely by volunteers. We have a very modest budget, yet have managed to make a number of groundbreaking contributions, both in hands-on practice and in seminal writings (handbooks, newsletters, and political tracts) that have helped bring about empowerment of the disempowered in the fields of Primary Health Care and Community Based Rehabilitation. And we have done it on a minimal budget -- largely because of teamwork of caring volunteers. For example, when David Werner wrote Where There Is No Doctor -- which, according to WHO, has become "the most used manual in the world in the field on International Health" -- the total monetary cost for the first edition, including printing, was just over USD $2000! This was possible because all the work -- writing, illustrating, formatting, peer review, and paste-up (by hand) of photo-ready copy, was done by volunteers.

HealthWrights still has a lot of things we want to accomplish, and ideas and information we want to share. But we still have a very limited budget -- partly because in so many ways we are "outside the box."

We very much need volunteer assistance -- especially in some of the technical areas where a number of us old timers tend to be klutzes. Depending on your available time and energy, you can help us in small or more extensive ways. Much of the help we need can be done from your own home, with communications with us through Internet, Skype or phone. To contact us you can write to volunteer@healthwrights.org

To follow is a list of things we need volunteer help. If you have the will and the skills to help us out in any of the following areas, please get in touch -- at least to further explore the possibilities. Our goal is to help create tools for the disadvantaged in today's increasingly polarized world, and to contribute toward helping create a more loving, caring community, locally and globally, in which we all work together for the common good.

List of areas in which HealthWrights needs your volunteer help -- Help with trouble-shooting with computer, website and Internet glitches: We desperately need a patient nerd who can help us resolve problems and teach us how to get out of and avoid them. Part of our difficulty is different members of our team use Mac, PC, and other (gratis) systems.

-- Help with management to HealthWrights site:

-- Some administrative tasks and also technology (IT) support

-- Help with developing a fundraising program:

-- Help with newsletters:

-- formatting of new newsletters

-- preparing topic-based index of old newsletter

-- Translation and formatting into Spanish of new newsletters

-- Translation and formatting into Spanish of old newsletters (beginning w/ key ones)

-- Help with HealthWrights' Politics of Health site: content, intro writing, formatting, etc. {Jim: you may want to add to this section]

-- Help with layout and formatting of online (and print) reports and photo-documentaries (including tweaking [with Gimp or Photoshop] of photos).

-- For a Spanish speaker with web skills -- help in training (through Skype and online) a disabled young women with basic computer/Internet skills to build an attractive, informative and educational website for PROJIMO Duranguito, a program run by disabled team that custom designs and builds wheelchairs and other equipment for disabled children.

-- Help with promotion and sales of HealthWrights books -- especially our two self-published books, "Nothing About Us Without Us: Developing Innovative Technologies For, By, and With Disabled Persons" by David Werner, and "Questioning the Solution: The Politics of Primary Health Care and Child Survival" by David Werner and David Sanders. (See online versions of both books on this site.)

-- Help with converting old, now classic educational slideshows (community health and rehabilitation) into DVD s and for online viewing (YouTube)

-- Preparation of original "Reports from the Sierra Madre" (see online version) into a publication (in print and online) with photos and drawings.

-- Help with organization and preparation for publication of the Newsletters from the Sierra Madre (see online versions of all 70 issues on this site), edited and arranged into 3 possible volumes: "Primary Health Care," "Disability/Community Based Rehabilitation," and "Politics of Health"